SharePoint 2013 part 2 – Improvements in User Experience

A new, slicker user interface in SharePoint 2013 is very welcome, with inline editing of pages and list items. This will result in a dramatic improvement in the overall end user experience. A more visually appealing Links Web Part provides a significant improvement over the good old Summary Links Web Part.

Wouldn’t it be great if email attachments could be saved straight into SharePoint. Well, now you can drag and drop emails from Outlook straight into SharePoint libraries. Other improvements in email management include Site Mailboxes to automatically route emails into SharePoint libraries (more on this in an upcoming post)

Social improvements include an updated Newsfeed which looks really cool. In particular, when integrated with the new Community template, supporting likes and ratings. Users can follow documents, people and sites which is another nice addition. Yammer is still a separate standalone application, although a Yammer web part is of course still available.

Significant mobile improvements are coming with new mobile apps for Win 8 and iOS, although they didn’t have these available to demo at the conference. They need to get these right first time, I’ll keep my fingers crossed. Android support is due to come at some point after the others.